


The Unstoppables

by Aviena



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Silver Shroud - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 04:01:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5770474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aviena/pseuds/Aviena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charmer is finding it hard to deal with her current situation. Deacon helps.</p><p>Set after my other Charmer/Deacon fic, <i>Imaginary</i>. Sort of a sequel, if you like. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unstoppables

Charmer gets like this, sometimes. Her heartbeat loses its rhythm, and it hammers against her breastbone as if she’s running from a deathclaw. Her hands go clammy. Her breath comes in pitiful little gasps that she hopes to god her friends can’t hear. Sometimes she has to find herself a safe spot and just close her eyes; lean back against the wall and shut out the fucked up world she’s found herself living in.

She knows exactly what this feeling is. It’s fear, grief and anger, all wrapped up in a neat little package, with a gift card addressed to her old-world name. _Fuck you, Alex._ She keeps the box sealed tight in the back of her head, only opening it when she has to cram in a new memory that she wants to repress. Nate – oh god, _Nate_ – and Shaun take up most of the space in there. Then there’s her parents, her friends, the neighbourhood kids whose laughter used to drift in through the kitchen window. She’s got a whole world squeezed in there, safe from the rads and the ferals and the rest of the fucked up shit she now deals with on a day-to-day basis.

But she’s been opening the box too often recently. Every time someone asks about her husband. Every time someone wants to know why she’s so eager to take down the Institute. Every time _The End of the World_ comes on the radio. Every time she stumbles across the final words of yet another dead sucker.

All the hurt is leaking out. It makes her heart race. It makes it hurt to breathe.

So Charmer decides to hole up for a few days on her own, away from the firefights, the arguing settlers, and the metric buttload of minor disasters needing her attention. Sanctuary is too crowded. HQ is too hectic. The Red Rocket’s too obvious. So she heads for Ticonderoga instead, a bottle of bourbon and half a box of sugar bombs under her arm. Hadn’t High Rise said she was welcome any time?

High Rise greets her at the elevator wearing his trade-mark million dollar grin. “Hey you! You okay?”

“You trying to tell me I look tired?” Charmer flashes a smile of her own, mostly to prove she’s not really offended – but she’s pleased to see High Rise, too. “Concealer’s pretty hard to come by out in the wastes, you know.” He chuckles and offers her a chair. She takes it, and he sits on the coffee table. Typical High Rise.

“You’re radiant, of course. Would I say anything else to a woman packing heat?”

“Maybe. If you’re feeling lucky.”

“Luck’s pretty hard to come by these days.” The bags under his eyes tell Charmer she doesn’t know the half of it. “You needing a place to stay?”

Charmer nods. “Just for a few nights. Need to lay low for a while.”

High Rise clicks his tongue in a damned good impression of Charmer’s high school maths teacher. “Welcome to the Railroad, agent. It’s guns blazin’ one day, and running like hell the next.”

“I’d prefer running to hiding.” She doesn’t mention what she’s hiding from, of course. She’s not entirely sure, herself.

“Too bad.” High Rise offers a wink to take the edge off his words. At that moment, a nervous looking agent comes running down the stairs, babbling about a mission with a codename Charmer has never heard. High Rise gets to his feet and follows the agent away. “Plenty of spare beds upstairs,” he calls back to Charmer when he’s got one foot out the door. “Stay as long as you like.”

Four days and nights pass uneventfully. They remind Charmer of the lazy days she passed during her pregnancy: slow, foggy montages of cold drinks, tasteless food, and comics she knows off by heart, punctuated by dark moods and unpredictable bouts of loneliness. High Rise is rarely there, but the other agents are bearable enough. They’re less edgy than her friends at HQ, and they mostly leave her to her own devices. She’s got nothing to complain about other than encroaching boredom; no reason to stay other than the fear she can’t properly identify. It lurks in the back of her mind, running its fingers through the ribbon that holds her Pandora’s Box shut. Charmer does her best to chase it away with Grognak, Manta Man and the rest of them, and it _works_ – sometimes. But the fear always comes back.

So it’s probably for the best that Deacon shows up when he does. Charmer almost doesn’t recognise him when he exits the elevator. He’s dirty and out of breath, sporting a fresh pink slash down the side of his face, and he’s got a new outfit: dark anorak, skinny jeans and sunglasses. He’s wearing a new wig, which is the bit that throws Charmer off. It’s _blonde_.

Gloomy as she is, Charmer still can’t help but laugh when she realises who he is. “Might want to rethink the hairdo, blondie. The Institute will spot you coming from three clicks out.” He’s not surprised to find her there – it’s obvious from the way he purposefully quirks his eyebrow. He grins and comes over to join her, flopping down on the couch beside her like he’s just run the Boston marathon. He smells like it, too, and Charmer wrinkles her nose.

The rule she normally applies with Deacon is that the first thing to come out of his mouth is almost always a lie. “Didn’t expect to find you here.” Charmer barely manages not to roll her eyes. “HQ is all in an uproar without you, you know. Carrington’s getting ready to send out a search party. Turns out a few days of radio silence from his favourite heavy are too much for the doc to handle.”

She cracks a smile. She hasn’t seen Deacon in a few weeks, not since her last trip to Sanctuary. It’s odd for them to go so long out of contact. They’re thick as thieves, as Deacon puts it; practically swimming in what he calls their “awesomeosity”. But to Charmer, his enthusiasm’s always seemed a little put on – and the last time they’d travelled together, she’d been convinced something was about to change. They’d stayed up all night, Charmer resting her head on his shoulder. Deacon had played with her hair while they roasted disgusting sweets over a weak, flickering fire. In the morning, though, he’d been cold and awkward, and Charmer had wondered if she should have put a stop to it.

She’s glad to see she was wrong. “I think we all know Carrington’s just rude to me because he’s got a crush. He’ll get over it.”

Deacon chuckles. “Poor guy. Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell.”

Charmer _never_ recognises his quotes, and that’s faintly embarrassing, so she just skips over them. “Why do you smell so bad?”

“ _Ouch._ ”

“No, really.”

“I’ve just been to the beach. It’s a long story. It involves lots of mirelurks and dead ferals. Trust me, you don’t want to hear it.” He cants his head, as if he’s just noticed the comic in her hand. “Grognak, huh? No Silver Shroud?”

Charmer presses her lips together and narrows her eyes at him. “The Silver Shroud is a radio show, not a comic. You know that!” Deacon’s not really into that kind of literature, but she’s made him read enough comics with her that he should at least know _that_.

“Oh yeah.” The grin he gives her makes it obvious he’s fishing for a reaction, but something’s changed in his voice, too. It’s teasing, but it’s… not. “I’m getting a bit of a soft spot for the Shroud. I think it’s the hat.”

“Who can blame you?”

Silence falls for several long moments, and Deacon just looks at her. Charmer can’t see much behind the sunglasses, but his gaze still seems searching. She breaks eye contact and buries her face in her comic, but her eyes won’t seem to focus on the page.

“So, when are you planning on returning to the fold, huh?” He nudges her as if to get her attention, but Charmer’s pretty sure he knows he already has it. “Drummer Boy’s got this hideous tie-dye coat I can steal for you if you want.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Soon.”

“Not to be _that guy_ , but how soon is soon? Those synths aren’t gonna save themselves, you know.”

She puts down the comic and gives him a withering look. “Some of them do, I’m sure.”

He sighs audibly. “Kind of beside the point, really.”

“What _is_ the point, Dee?” _Fuck_ , she’s said it now – and she can’t take it back. Deacon must be worried by the look on her face, because he puts an arm around her shoulders, but Charmer hardly even notices. Her heartbeat loses its rhythm. Her hands go clammy. She’s breathing too fast, but her lungs don’t give a shit about what’s _normal._ What _is_ the point? What is she even doing here?

No husband, no family, no home. No career, no friends, no prospects. Just grief. Anger. Fear. Not for the first time, she wishes she’d been the one to carry Shaun down into the vault. Nate had the training for this. Nate had the experience. Nate had the strength. Oh god, _Nate_.

And what does Charmer have? She’s got tears on her face, a ticking time bomb of repressed memories locked up in her head, and a collection of guns she’s almost afraid to look at.

“Hey.” Deacon squeezes her shoulders. “ _Hey_. You okay?”

“Yeah.” She sounds like a chain smoker at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon.

He takes off his sunglasses and looks at her. Really _looks_ at her. “You know what? I think you’ve got the right idea.”

“You do?”

“You heard me. You know what they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder. By the time you go back to HQ, Carrington’s going to treat you like _royalty_.”

Charmer quickly dries her cheeks with her sleeve and takes two deep, slow breaths. She doesn’t answer him, and he seems to recognise her need for silence. He sits with her for several long, quiet minutes, while Ticonderoga’s residents go about their business as if Charmer and her smelly blonde friend are entirely invisible. The two of them are like a great mountain, Charmer thinks, silently enduring the force of the elements. Deacon’s arm is warm around her shoulder. His breathing is calm and measured. Charmer eventually finds her own breaths matching that rhythm.

“You mind if I hang out here for a while?” Deacon asks eventually. A slight smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want to be the one that has to tell Carrington his favourite heavy doesn’t want to see him.”

She’s going to get him back for all the teasing about Carrington. But not today. “I guess you can stay.” She’s smiling too, and it’s not forced. “I lied to you, before.”

He doesn’t get it, of course. “Huh? About what?”

“The Silver Shroud _is_ in a comic book. He’s in the Unstoppables.” Deacon groans and clutches at his stomach like she’s wounded him. Charmer laughs lightly and slaps his hand away. “Don’t be like that,” she giggles. He places his hand back where it was, _over_ hers, and for a moment Charmer’s convinced something is about to change. Then she looks down at the comic, shyly, and the moment’s gone. “Come on,” she says. “I’ll show you.”

Deacon chuckles and lets her pull him to his feet. He presses the back of one hand against his forehead, mock-swooning as she tugs him up the stairs. “Be still my heart. The _Unstoppables!_ ”

Charmer turns just long enough to stick her tongue out at him. Sure, she’s got puffy red eyes, a ticking time bomb of repressed memories locked up in her head, and a collection of guns she’s almost afraid to look at. But she’s got Deacon, too.

When he’s with her, she’s suddenly sure that will be enough.


End file.
